The diurnal pattern of on-the-job injuries

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 127, Issue 9, 2004, Pages 18-25

  Fortson, Kenneth N ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 10044297734     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, Report of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979).
2. OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Chernobyl - Ten Years On (Paris, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995); on the Internet at www.nea.fr.
3. See, for example, "No More Nine-to-Five," The Economist, Jan. 10, 1998;
4. and Valerie Marchant, "In the Deep of the Night," Time, Nov. 1, 1999.
5. See Current Employment Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics, various years); on the Internet at www.bls.gov.
6. State Workers' Compensation Laws (U.S. Department of Labor, January 2004).
7. The particular windows chosen with the use of this procedure are as follows: Day shift. Begins between 1:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M.; ends between 1:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. Evening shift. Begins between 7:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M.; ends between 7:00 P.M. and 7:00 A.M. Night shift. Begins between 12:00 P.M. and 12:00 A.M.; ends between 12:00 A.M. and 12:00 P.M.
8. In a preliminary analysis, all results in this article were computed without the imputed schedules and were found to be qualitatively similar to the results obtained with imputation.
9. Note that this formula is equivalent to taking the number of injuries per hour and multiplying by a constant that depends only on the age group. Hence, the informational content of the injury ratio calculation used in equation (1) is the same as that contained in the calculation of an injury rate, which is the number of injuries divided by the number of hours. However, because the numerator and denominator in the analysis presented here come from two separate sources, the ratio of injury shares to hour shares was calculated in order to avoid confusion and to provide a statistic with a more transparent interpretation. Because of this relationship, the remainder of the article uses the terms "injury ratio" and "injury rate" interchangeably.
10. Daniel S. Hamermesh, Workdays, Workhours, and Work Schedules (Kalamazoo, MI, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1996).
11. In this analysis, executive, professional, administrative, managerial, technician, and sales occupations are considered white-collar occupations. Precision production, machine-operating, material-moving, transportation- handling and cleaning, farming, fishing, and forestry occupations are deemed blue-collar occupations, and private household services, protective services, and other services are adjudged service occupations. Industries are divided into five categories: (1) agriculture, mining, and construction, which also includes forestry and fishing; (2) manufacturing, including durable and nondurable goods; (3) infrastructure, comprising transportation, communications, utilities, and sanitation services; (4) commerce, consisting of retail and wholesale trade, finance, insurance, and real estate; and (5) services, including household, repair, personal, recreational, medical, social, educational, and other professional services.
12. This formula is similar to calculations that Robert Shimer and, in a separate work, Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B, Krueger, used to examine how compositional differences in age and education in the U.S. workforce could account for unemployment patterns over the past three decades. (See Robert Shimer, "Why Is the U.S. Unemployment Rate So Much Lower?" in Ben Bernanke and Julio Rotemberg (eds.), NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1998 (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998);
13. and Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, "The High-Pressure U.S. Labor Market of the 1990s," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Washington, DC, The Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 1-87.
14. Ed Coburn and Martin Moore-Ede, "Keeping the Night Shift Alert," Journal of Workers' Compensation, vol. 10, no. 2, winter 2001, pp. 22-35.
15. James K. Wyatt, Angela Ritz-De Cecco, Charles A. Czeisler, and Derk-Jan Dijk, "Circadian Temperature and Melatonin Rhythms, Sleep, and Neurobehavioral Function in Humans Living on a 20-h Day," American Journal of Physiology, vol. 277, October 1999, pp. R1152-R1163.
16. Hamermesh, Workdays.